Treffer: The DASL Language: Programmer’s Guide and Reference Manual

This report provides an intuitive description of the DASL 1 application modeling language, followed by a formal language specification. DASL was originally developed as part of the Ace research project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories to bridge the gap between high level application modeling languages, such as UML, and the current implementation languages and middleware in which applications are written, such as Java™, J2EE™, and evolving middleware based on web services. The primary goal of the research was to seek a sweet spot between the elegant abstractions possible in UML and the implementations one can express in Java, by creating a complete application modeling language that captures the application’s semantics completely and globally. The resultant modeling language is effectively a domain-specific language for a very large domain of distributed business applications. At its core, it is a textual language that, like Java and most 3GLs, is easily read and understood by people. The textual language is tied to a well-defined metamodel that supports a graphical, UML view. The DASL deployment engine converts an application “model ” directly into executable code, bypassing hand coding of an implementation “model. ” DASL vastly simplifies the process of storyboarding, prototyping, and implementing